Nairobi — Few pictures taken of the Uganda Railways in its heyday match for illustrative resonance the black and white photograph of US president Teddy Roosevelt on hunting safari at the turn of the last century:

Seated on the observation platform, right at the front of the steam locomotive, gun in hand, looking as wide as the locomotive itself, Theodore Roosevelt was one of two most famous travellers on the new line; the other, Winston Churchill, who would become the line's biggest champion, also rode in similar fashion.

Like many famous passengers aboard the train, theirs was the prerogative to stop the train should they come upon wild game and want to draw a bead on a lion or a zebra; larger-than-life transformational figures, they exuded the kind of energy the new line brought.

In 1909, Roosevelt travelled from Mombasa through the interior on the train, going on "safari" -- a word he is said to have popularised -- in an expedition on which it is said, his gun never stopped smoking, personally killing as many as 260 animals.

With an entourage of 500 porters and four tonnes of salt for curing animal skin, this was a grand trek.

Even before it was finished, the railway had already invented East African tourism -- a blood sport in which the rich competed in spending money as much as in massacring lions.

Within a few years of its arrival, towns from Mombasa to Mbarara would acquire uniform faces, uniform flavours -- somewhat European, mostly Asian, Islamic, not exactly African; the amalgam spoke of the cultural intrusion that alienated and transformed East Africa.

A location on the rolling plains of central Kenya, just off the Rift Valley escarpment described as Uaso en Airobe (place of cold water) in Maasai, whose mild climate seduced engineers George Whitehouse and Ronald Preston into setting up railway headquarters, became a railway camp:

Railway workers needed feeding and other necessities so traders set up shop alongside the tents.

Law and order needed maintaining; police and government came.

Government needed comfort; doctors, hotels and entertainment came, and so without anyone intending it, Nairobi was invented.

A thoroughfare called Sixth Avenue opened up, later becoming Victoria Avenue; in turn Delamere Avenue, it was renamed Kenyatta Avenue with the coming of independence:

In the Nairobi of the day, it was said, Yokohama prostitutes ran a bordello; settler farmers descended on the town for horse races, Hollywood movie makers experimented with shooting wildlife documentaries from hot-air balloons. Real American, gun-toting cowboys marched down the streets, guns blazing.

Anything, it seemed, could happen in "Nyrobe":

Lord Delamere and friends, delirious with alcohol, might casually tip a party bore through a second floor window or lock up a barman in his fridge for the night should he say "closing time."

Everything, it seemed, that would characterise East Africa, came on the train; from Jacarandas to toilet seats, hurricane lamps, soap, American Khaki (Merikani), chapatis, samosa, Elspeth Huxley, turmeric, bicycles, Greek pillars, Hindu and Sikh temples, sewing machines, Karen Blixen and neckties, they all rocketed in once the journey from coast to Lake Victoria was cut from months to days.

Literally, the locomotive introduced a new rhythm of life.

"The first boxers and musicians in Kenya all came from families of railway workers," David Gitundu, part time guide at the Nairobi Railway Museum says. "They were the first people to become mobile. They were connected with new ideas."

Like the Internet a century later, those connected to the train were harbingers of new times.

A guitar player often worked on the railway -- a factor important in the birth of Benga music in Kenya, for instance.

The term "railway families" is heard little today but was once a lively social category. An itinerant, multicultural crowd, knowledgeable about lathes and boilers, they pioneered metropolitanism on the region. They had given up nativity for a powerful new thing.

Renowned Kenyan news cameraman and hero of the 1984 Ethiopian famine effort, Mohinder Dhillon tells the story of how his family left Punjab in the 1940s when his father got a job on the Uganda Railway.

David Gitundu for his part tells the story of how as a boy in the 1960s, scores of people stood watching the train approach and should the driver turn out to be black, the crowd roared approval.

Patrick Ogwang was just under 10 years in the early 1970s when his uncle took him on the train from Lango in northern Uganda, to Jinja in the south. The railway gave them homes and futures, invented new dreams and made old ones possible.

A century since its arrival, it is all but dead.

Yet like kindred spirits, they don't move too far from it; Dhillon still visits the Nairobi Museum; Gitundu makes a living telling the story and Ogwang is a railway employee in Uganda.

Dhillon remembers the "china and the silver, the tablecloths changed at every station, the folding tables. It used to be good, so beautiful.

They always served kippers. No journey by train was complete without kippers."

"You saw the steam in the distance," Ogwang says. "At night you saw the fire in the boilers.

When it passed, the boiler sounded like it was singing "Paka naka Jinja, Paka naka Jinja..." (all the way to Jinja).

The railway and the hierarchy it brought, its essentialisation of the clock, was the vehicle by which European industrial values of organisation and productivity were felt in the region.

For centuries, East Africa's contact with the outside world had been the tortuous porter caravans.

Modernity as defined in Western, Islamic and Asian terms, was confined to Mombasa, the foothold in controlling the Indian Ocean trade with the interior of East Africa.

A free city of sorts, the fact that it possessed a cultural air very different to the landmass beyond it, and that it saw the black peoples beyond as means and commodity, Mombasa was a forerunner of the cultural arrogance that today still leaves many in this region ashamed of their ethnic backgrounds.

The arrival of George Whitehouse in December 1895 marked the beginning of the expansion of Mombasa's cultural heritage -- and burden, it is important to qualify -- into the interior.

When you make a reverse journey, going from interior to coast, and reach Mombasa, you instantly feel you have been there before.

You recognise the Greek pillars, the Arabian domes and arched windows and Indian facades that you saw in Kisumu, Jinja and Mbale. Of all the railway towns, these three bear the strongest resemblances to Mombasa -- and not without reason:

The railway constructed a racial hierarchy in which the black was at the bottom, the Asian in the middle and the white, a very distant top.

Hence, for the white settler and colonialist or visitor, it was a time of immense prestige and access -- as witness Roosevelt.

The Asian population lived in some degree of isolation, suspected yet needed by the white administration as financier and racial cushion against the black.

The railway was made possible by the defeat of the Africans and to this extent, everything was built against them.

This line-up was brutal. For years, Africans were virtually not allowed on the train.

Considered too lazy to do the manual labour on the ralway, they were not considered good enough to lift even a stone.

As a result, they learnt nothing of the juggernaut that steamed into their backyard.

Even more, the colonialist had a plan for him, as Governor Sir Charles Elliot put it, the "white mates black in a very few moves...

"The sooner the native disappears and is unknown, except in the books of anthropology, the better."

The uniformity of the towns is explained by this hierarchy.

In all these towns, the commercial sectors reflect Asian Architecture and patterns of life.

There are the graceful, delicate carved eaves and awnings lining the streets, at the end of which is a temple or a mosque.

The white presence is outside the town centre.

Manorial, occupying moist suburbs, their cathedrals large and removed from commercial districts, the mansions and bungalows describe privilege and remove it far from manual labour.

In none of these is the African featured.

He was kept at bay by force of law, such that though the action was taking place on his continent, the centre of the action contained not a jot of his ideas.

According to Jangjeet Mangat in his book, The Asians of East Africa, key Indian personalities like Allidina Visram and A.M Jeevanjee made it possible for the railway to be built by, in the case of Jeevanjee, directly recruiting workers back in India, selling supplies to the railway and getting contracts building railway houses.

Jeevanjee and Visram were among the richest men of their times, running businesses from Ethiopia to Malawi, from Mombasa to Adelaide. The colonial administration relied on their capital to turn East Africa into a viable economic unit.

Modern, capitalist economic life in Entebbe, Kisumu, Kampala, Nairobi, Mbale, Soroti and elsewhere was more or less run by Visram; the Asian businessmen in these towns, more often than not, were operating his franchises.

Incubated in Mombasa, the business patterns they knew to work in that seaport, they replicated in the interior. It is for this reason that the towns resemble each other.

Colonial administrators encouraged Asian enterprise to prevent whites and blacks keeping shop because, one, selling cooking oil to black people degraded white prestige and two, to force the black man into manual labour, he must have no independent source of income himself.

The railway propagated a uniformity of rank and taste, outlooks and aspirations that made it progressive to have a gable roof, verandah-fronted shops and eat chapatis.

A Maasai and a Muganda would wear the same cut of jacket because it came on the same line.

Post-Independence education in the region presents the railway in heroic terms.

Hence, little of what you were taught in school prepares you for seeing the line a hundred years later and experiencing the menace it presented to Africans.

Constructed against their will, it refused to negotiate cultural terms with them -- the closer you get to the coast, the more you realise the damage this cultural bullying did.

The patterns of African life become less recognisable the closer you get to Mombasa.

Part European, part Asian, mostly Arabic and Islamic, Africans in towns around these areas live culturally neutral lives.

Shortly after the railway reached it, Nairobi took over from Mombasa as the major urban centre of all East Africa.

And like Mombasa, it began to reflect the hijacking of public space by the foreign cultures.

Neighbourhoods, streets, schools and buildings bore mostly English, London-recollecting names - Hurlingham, Westlands, Eastleigh.

Even by the time the train arrived, the black people on the coast had lost much of their culture to Islam.

Coming from the interior towards the coast, you see and react to this, instinctively feel threatened.

The architecture of the towns enables foreign lifestyles and religions.

While Asian, Arab and European religious buildings proliferate in all these towns, there are no structures for African religious beliefs.

The ideas of Africa are to be found nowhere along the railway line.

It is little wonder that with the end of colonialism, the line decayed -- the collective cultural knowledge of the Africans was kept away from it.

All of this history comes to life when you travel the line, but you see everywhere that the railway never asked permission from the continent and today, leads a ghostly life at the back of towns. The train stops.

There, still standing, are vestiges of the steam age - the water pumps and tanks, the coal silos - rusted and crumbling, you wonder how they once were markers of prestige.

Since Independence, little useful has been done to repair the cultural damage the railway wrought.